Innuos Next-Gen NET

The Next-Gen NET is the audiophile network switch Innuos built to sit between the customer's home network and the company's Next-Gen tier of streaming products. A high-end switch engineered as a companion to the ZEN Next-Gen, the ZENith Next-Gen, and the STATEMENT — and built around the same power-supply architecture Innuos developed for the ZENith Next-Gen itself.

The architectural case is what one would expect of a serious dealer-only network switch in a reference audio system. The data a streamer pulls from the local library or a streaming service arrives at the chassis as an electrical signal carrying a packet payload alongside a great deal of high-frequency noise generated by everything upstream — the wall power, the router, the ISP gateway, the cabling running through walls shared with anything else electrical in the home. The streamer downstream reads the payload; what the streamer's clock and power rails do with the upstream noise is the part the consumer-grade switch in the closet has no opinion about. The Next-Gen NET is the audio engineer's opinion about the noise, executed at the Next-Gen power tier.

The power supply is the heart of the chassis. The Next-Gen NET matches the power supply of the ZENith Next-Gen — ARC6 power rectification, a 300-volt-amp transformer — and uses four independent power rails fed through CX regulator modules to each critical component inside the switch. The clock sees its own rail. The Ethernet PHY sees its own. The signal-path electronics see their own. The chassis sees its own. Each domain is electrically isolated from the others and each is given the kind of regulation Innuos builds into the streamers above it. The result is a network switch whose noise floor is set by deliberate engineering rather than by whatever the office-equipment industry happened to ship that year.

The board inside is Innuos's latest-generation WaveNET, with an SFP fibre port and custom firmware. The fibre port lets the customer break the electrical path entirely between the network and the streamer — what reaches the chassis is light, what leaves is clean copper, and the noise on the upstream side is left behind at the boundary. The WaveNET board is engineered for high-resolution, reference-level streaming systems. The streamer downstream sees cleaner packets, locks more firmly, and contributes less of its own work toward cleaning up what it received.

The Next-Gen NET is the network link in a Next-Gen Innuos system — the chassis that closes the loop between the streamer and the rest of the network and makes the front end behave the way the front end was engineered to behave.